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Pete Hoekstra, a Republican who spent 10 years on the committee with oversight of America’s clandestine operations, dubs Mr. Obama and his top diplomat, Mrs. Clinton, Architects of Disaster — the title of a new book he’s written accusing them of bungling the run-up to war, wrongly ousting leader Moammar Gadhafi, then leaving the country a mess that has already come back to bite with the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi. Pete Hoekstra, the former chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, tells the real story behind the tragic events in Benghazi and the Obama Administration’s disastrous foreign policy catastrophe in Libya. Architects of Disaster: The Destruction of Libya documents the role played by an inexperienced president and a politicized US State Department under Hillary Clinton in turning a stable North African country into a failed jihadist state spreading terrorism throughout the Middle East and releasing a flood of fearful immigrants onto the Mediterranean and into Europe. Hoekstra, a Republican who spent 10 years on the committee with oversight of America’s clandestine operations, puts President Barack Obama and his top diplomat, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, squarely in the frame, claiming they left Libya as little more than a terrorist training camp. He believes that there will not be more bad news to come.
“How many are aware, for example, that Islamic terrorists almost surely got their hands on the remnants of Gaddafi’s chemical weapons arsenal of sulfur mustard gas, only about half of which had been destroyed at the time of the uprising?” Mr. Hoekstra argues. “The tragedy of misbegotten American policy in Libya continues to unfold, and only the most deluded optimists bel President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton inherited a Libya in the midst of slow but sure liberalization — “a model ally” in fighting terrorists — and instead created a training ground for terrorists, the former chief of the House intelligence committee argues in a new book reviewing the evidence.
The book was written for the Investigative Project on Terrorism, where Mr. Hoekstra is a senior fellow. It is one of the worlds preeminent research centres in the field.
Hoekstra argues, using publicly reported sources, that Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton should have seen Libya’s progress after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which scared Gadhafi into ceding his nuclear weapons program and paying damages to the victims of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
As a member of the intelligence committee, Mr. Hoekstra traveled to Libya in 2003, at the behest of the Bush administration, to determine whether Gadhafi’s conversion was real, and he says Republicans and Democrats on that trip unanimously concluded the Libyan leader had been scared straight — both by the U.S., and by fears of radical jihadists overthrowing him.
“Yes, Gaddafi was a monster, but he was our monster. In the ways that mattered most, he was preferable — immensely so — to many of those who brought him down, and the stability of Libya under his control was preferable to the chaos that has followed,” the former congressman concludes. “Although NATO effectively brought down Gaddafi, it broke Libya but didn’t own it or do anything to fix it.”
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